[WeChat: ilieyun) Beijing] Reported on March 9 (Text/Riemann)
At 2 a.m. today, the 2022 spring Apple launch came as scheduled.
Apple's spring release brought a total of 6 new products: iPhone 13, iPhone SE3, iPad Air5, M1 Ultra chip, Mac Studio console and Studio Display display. From the content level, Apple's PC products are more attractive than mobile products.
Mobile: Squeeze toothpaste innovation
First, let's introduce a few new ideas brought by Apple at the mobile phone level.
Cook first introduced the flagship iPhone 13 Pro. It only adds Cangling green on the basis of the iPhone 11 Pro, and the other configurations have not changed at all, and the price is still 5999/7999 yuan.
The iPhone SE will change a bit more. It is the first SE to support 5G, and it is also equipped with the A15 bionic chip of the iPhone 13 series, and the 6-core CPU is 1.8 times faster than the iPhone 8, and the endurance has been slightly improved, but it has not changed much. In terms of color matching, it has midnight, starlight and red colors, and also supports TouchID. However, it is regrettable that the SE series is still not a full screen.
In addition, as Apple's cheapest mobile phone, the iPhone SE has actually increased its price. The price of the 64GB/128GB/125GB storage version is 3499/3899/4699 yuan, respectively, while the starting price of the previous generation SE is 3299 yuan, an overall increase of 200 yuan.
In contrast, the 5th-generation iPad Air has more upgrades. Its biggest improvement is that it is equipped with the M1 chip that was only available in the previous Pro series. Compared to the previous generation, the new iPad Air can improve the performance of the 8-core CPU by up to 60%, and the 8-core graphics processor can improve graphics performance by up to 2 times.
In addition, its front camera has also been upgraded to 12 million pixels. Colors include space gray, starry sky, pink, purple and blue, and still start at $599.
In general, these 3 new products on the mobile terminal still belong to the new bottle of old wine, there is no qualitative innovative design, basically squeezed toothpaste innovation. Reservations for these new products will begin on March 11 and go on sale on March 18. At the same time, the previous generation of the new Apple product has been removed from the shelves at the same time.
PC: Launch of the new chip M1 Ultra
The biggest suspense of this Apple conference actually fell on the PC side. Apple updated the M1 chip again, introducing the M1 Ultra, which is mainly used in Mac desktops.
According to Apple, the M1 Ultra uses a breakthrough grain-to-die technology, polycrystalline silicon architecture UltraFusion enables grain density up to 2 times the existing technology, transmission speeds of up to 2.5TB/s, for low latency, ultra-high bandwidth and high energy efficiency.
The M1 Ultra has 114 billion transistors, which is 7 times the size of the M1. Significantly larger area with 800GB/s memory channel and 128GB unified memory. It has 20 core CPUs and 16 high-performance processing cores, 64-core GPUs, which is 8 times faster than M1, and the media processor engine performance is 2 times faster than M1. With high performance, the M1 Ultra consumes 90% less power than today's 16-core PCs.
However, the M1 Ultra is not essentially a comprehensive innovation, but a further upgrade on the basis of Apple's previous M1 Max. Through Apple's Ultra Fusion package architecture, the grains of the two M1 Max chips are directly connected together, which is equivalent to M1's "1+1=2". This architecture allows the M1 Ultra to still show the integrity of a chip when working, and it will also be recognized by all software as a complete chip, and developers can directly use its performance without rewriting the code.
Apple is powering the M1 Ultra on its console, the Mac Studio. On the processor, in addition to the M1 Ultra chip, the M1 Max processor can also be selected. In addition, the interface of the host has also been upgraded to solve the pain point of insufficient interface end. It has 2 USB-C ports on the front, 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2 USB-A ports, 1 HDMI interface, 10Gb Ethernet interface and 3.5mm audio interface distributed on the side.
In order to match the Mac Studio host, Apple also brought a Studio Display display, which has a 27-inch display with a resolution of 5120×2880, that is, a 5K level, supports 10bit display color depth, screen brightness of 600nit, a 12-megapixel wide-angle camera at the top of the screen, a total of 6 speakers and 3 microphones in the machine.
In terms of price, the most basic version of the Mac Studio is priced at 14999 yuan, the choice of the basic version of the M1 Ultra chip, 64GB memory + 1TB storage version of the price is 29999 yuan, to pull to the top, it takes nearly 60,000 yuan, plus the price of 11499 yuan Studio Display, it takes nearly 70,000 yuan, which is not the budget configuration of ordinary people.
Overall, Apple's spring conference this year was generally flat, and the launch of the M1 Ultra chip was the biggest highlight of the whole conference. In the era of mobile phones entering the era of stock competition, it has not been able to roll out new ideas, and at this time, the PC side should be able to obtain a larger market on the basis of the previous.